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This morning on Yahoo there’s a blurb about the imminent end of the forty-hour work week. This doesn’t phase me, nor do I find it particularly compelling writing, but it does give me pause to wonder:

Who in this country actually has a forty hour work week?!

See – for example, I can tell you for a fact that this article is completely irrelevant to people in academia. Show me a teacher who works forty hours a week, and I’ll show you someone who’s nowhere near doing the job the way it ought to be done. Grading home and classwork, alone, takes me about ten hours a week. Then there’s actually being in class with the students – which in my case, six, hour-long classes a day, five days a week – is already 30 hours. Then there’s the planning period, another five hours and- oh, looky, we’re already at forty-five right there. If you are a teacher, then you know that the planning period is gone before it ever started because by the time you write your lesson plans up, check your emails, answer your students’ questions and make copies, that hour’s long gone. Especially if you have to wait for the copy machine. (I and the other English teacher at my school rarely go to lunch; we grab one and head back to the classroom to grade and read for classes, or to catch up on things we haven’t had time to do during the teaching day). I used routinely to put in an hour or two after work every day before I had children; if I weren’t the one responsible for picking them up from daycare every day, I would probably still stay after much later than I do…as it stands I take a lot of work home with me, and I have a ridiculously huge stack of paperwork to file and organize and books to re-shelve in my classroom….someday.

Then, on top of that, if you’re anything like a responsible educator, you also are researching and implementing new materials and re-reading what you teach instead of relying on your notes from a long-ago college class you read a book you’re teaching in. Add in faculty meetings, conferences, tutoring, and any other extra duties, and you are easily stretching the workweek to fifty-plus hours. I routinely put in 60 hours myself, and when I have long papers to grade, that number jumps up to seventy or more – which is more often than I’d like to think about right now.

I’m not complaining, and to be honest, most of the good teachers I know don’t. That’s the job. We knew that when we signed on for it. Most of us are hopelessly addicted to research and writing and talking about our subject matter anyhow, so we might as well do it for a living. But realistically, I think it is important to assert that forty hours a week makes for an ineffective teacher, and if a teacher seems a little frazzled once in a while, or is a bit late getting papers turned back, or doesn’t seem super-cheerful and caring towards you, odds are its because s/he has spent an inordinate amount of time on the job lately and needs a break that isn’t coming. Even the best teachers get tired and short-tempered sometimes, no matter how much they’d like to maintain equilibrium. No matter how much you love it, sometimes you do actually need to step back from it and deal with other things – like bills, the leak in your ceiling from your bathroom, and your own children.

Thank a teacher today…and mean it.

Now, as far as teaching goes, I love it, and I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. There honestly isn’t much I’d rather be doing. But occasionally, life does get in the way and make things not very much fun at all…case in point? When your chemotherapy has given you shingles. I’m on day three of this, and they assure me that it gets better round about Day 5 or 7 or 8 or so (I have forty-hour shingles?!). I’m not sure I can handle it that long. My hands and feet are more swollen now than they were when I was pregnant, and on top of that swelling, they itch and burn like the dickens. I would SO MUCH rather have a forty hour work week, doing ANY job, than forty hours of the shingles. Exhibit A:

All of the redness on the outside of the bunion and pinky toe, plus the redness on the tops of the toes, the red-and-white streaks and bumps and the swelling, is from shingles. The shininess on the second toe is oozing from one of the sores.

The redness, itching and swelling in my hands --look at those knuckles-- is so bad they hurt non-stop, and holding a pen is excruciating. It's hard to conjure up the motivation to grade papers when your hands look like this. Trust me, it feels so much worse than it looks...

All of the bumpiness on my arm is shingles, not raised hair follicles or bug bites or cellulite or anything benign like that. Nope --horrifyingly itchy, shingles.

I present to you, my list of Five Things I Would Rather Experience Than Shingles:

1. Another lumpectomy. At least they give you good drugs for the pain, and you know the pain is finite.

2. A colonoscopy.

3. Five mammograms in a row.

4. The Disney World “It’s a Small World” ride for more than an hour. If you have ever been on it, then you know this is torture.

5. Being (non-fatally) stabbed during a mugging.

Today’s random Arthurian fact of the day: In the Grail legends, which ultimately become a central aspect of the King Arthur literary tradition thanks to writers such as Robert de Boron and Sir Thomas Malory, there is a figure who is (like me) afflicted with a painful, dolorous wound. This is the Fisher King, whose affliction variously stems from a sword-wound to the thigh or groin area, or a wound on the heel or ankle, but whose sickness is always so agonizing that the very land he rules has been laid waste as a result of it. Now, I don’t rule over any lands, but I can assure you that my own dolorous shingles could certainly, over time, if not cured, lead to  a very poorly-maintained environment. Fortunately, ultimately the Fisher King is healed and his lands restored…which hopefully bodes well for me, also.

Here’s a nice, comprehensive snapshot look at the Fisher King motif in Arthurian legend.